Julia Child as You’ve Never Seen Her Before: Meet Sarah Lancashire, the Surprising Star of HBO Max’s ‘Julia’
Actress Sarah Lancashire was about 10 pages into reading the pilot script for the new HBO Max TV series Julia when she gasped over a sudden realization and hurriedly phoned her agent.
“I said, ‘You don’t know who this is, do you?’ and he said, ‘No…’” Lancashire recently recounted to The Daily Beast over Zoom. “I said, ‘This is Julia Child!’” His response: “Who is Julia Child?”
The truth is, it wasn’t just her agent who had a limited awareness of the woman who may be the most influential and recognized cooking TV personality in mainstream American culture outside of Martha Stewart—whose path to fame Child certainly paved the way for with her hugely influential program The French Chef in the 1960s. Lancashire’s familiarity stemmed solely from the marketing for the 2009 film Julie & Julia starring Meryl Streep; Child wasn’t as much of a presence in the U.K., where Lancashire resides.